The Oxymoron Factor 2: Part Ii, the Tale of the Ring: a Kaddish for Civilization

By Frank Stiffel

The Tale of the Ring: a Kaddish for Civilization is the second part of a 4-Part Holocaust memoir called THE OXYMORON FACTOR. In it, the author recounts his experiences in a variety of Nazi sites where ancient accounts were settled with the use of modern means. This is also a tale that evolves around a mystical Ring, redemption through Love and Faith and a Scale of Justice that weighs the burden of Remembering versus that of Forgiving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 5, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462842704

Frank Stiffel

Frank Stiffel, a former inmate of the Nazi Camps Treblinka and Auschwitz, arrives in the USA with his wife Ione and their three-year-old daughter Aurora, after a four-year Italian interlude in his neo-Darwinian struggle for survival of this least fit of the fittest. With all links to the first 30 years of his life severed, he comes to New York with no money, no marketable skills and hardly any knowledge of English. What’s more, there is no one to extend a helping hand. Is life worth fighting for? Look for an answer to this question in “The House of Margie”.

Book preview

THE

OXYMORON

FACTOR

2

Part II, The Tale of the Ring:

a Kaddish for Civilization

Frank Stiffel

Copyright © 2001 by Frank Stiffel. Cover & Art by Aurora Stiffel Berman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

Contents

1. LVOV, CCCP.

2. GERMAN INVASION.

3. THE WARSAW GHETTO.

4. TREBLINKA.

5. ESCAPE.

6. THE OTHER SIDE.

7. FREEZE-FRAME: THE GESTAPO.

8. DIE QUARANTANE. (READ: DEE QUARANTAHNEH)

9. KOBIER.

[A SUB-CAMP OF AUSCHWITZ].

10. BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE.

11. DER KRANKENBAU.

12. FAREWELL TO AUSCHWITZ.

13. SO LONG, MY POLAND.

I dedicate this book to my father and mother, whom

the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators had murdered

in the Death Camp of Treblinka on September 5th, 1942.

I dedicate it to my wife Ione, whom Destiny

put on my path as the result of that Murder.

And I dedicate it to our daughter Aurora

and granddaughter Nicole, who are here to perpetuate

the growth of the Family Tree, which the Nazis had tried to uproot by Murder.

DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES,

NO FOREIGN SYMBOLS COULD BE REPRODUCED.

The Author beg’s the Reader’s indulgence.

1. LVOV, CCCP.

The city of Lwow was dead. It lay in dark frigid night, under a black sky, like the dead body of a soldier fallen on a battlefield and abandoned by his comrades in retreat. The four of us, young Jewish patriots who had returned from our studies in foreign universities to fight for Poland, the only fatherland we had ever had, crossed the toll line manned by two self-appointed militiamen, a Pole and a Ukrainian. They asked us to identify ourselves before letting us enter the town. Together, we had seen the battle-ready Polish army marching eastward. We had seen the same soldiers trudging westward, disarmed, unshaven and disheveled. And we had seen the Soviet airplanes, tanks, motorized cavalry and horizon-to-horizon infantry columns invading what until the seventeenth of September 1939 was Poland. Going back toward Lwow, we saw Mother and Father in Martin’s modern apartment in the town of Zloczow. Mother cried. She had the gift of foreseeing the future, and what she saw now was bleak. Father was angry. He didn’t like the Soviet invaders, even though they kept promising to protect Poland from Hitler. He considered them rude, awkward and uncultivated in manner and behavior, and, last but not least, untrustworthy. ‘They came to stay,’ he said. Mother sighed. ‘Never again in my life am I going to see my son Max.’ Max, the third in a line of four sons, eight years my senior, had left for the United States in August that year. His first letter from America arrived one day before Germany’s attack on Poland. Father sent him on a mission. ‘I prepared everything for you,’ Father said on the day of Max’s departure for Gdynia, the only port Poland possessed on her 120-kilometer Baltic shoreline where my brother was going to embark. ‘A carload of baskets and other willowware is already crossing the Atlantic. All you have to do is to run our sales office in New York efficiently. Mother and I will join you in a year. I need about ten months to liquidate my business interests in Poland.’ Father had some shares in the newest and the most prestigious Movie Theater in Lwow, the Kino Palace, but most of his holdings were in Rudnik-nad-Sanem, a small town in central Poland where some 90% of the Polish basket industry were concentrated. He was the president of the National Association of Polish Basket Manufacturers with the H.Q. in Rudnik-nad-Sanem. What a laugh! All but one of those Polish manufacturers were Orthodox Jews, with beards, earlocks, black satin capotes and black felt hats. Father went to shul only for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; our house was KOSHER L’PESACH only during the Passover week. But the Orthodox needed a shabes-goy; somebody who spoke fluent Polish, had university education and could sit down with representatives of the Polish government for a shot of vodka and a bribe for the privilege of letting the Jews export the baskets made by Polish peasants to New York. There was an import quota in Poland intended to curtail Jewish participation in this vital part of the Country’s economy. Whenever the Orthodox exported the baskets, they received a document called a KONOSAMENT, a proof of export. Thus, Father traveled all over Poland, contacting importers of foreign industrial equipment, luxury objects and agribusiness commodities, and selling them the precious Konosamenty without which they couldn’t get an import permit. Father sold most of his Konosamenty to his long-time business friend Adolf Pollak, who, a dental technician at the beginning of his adult life, learned how to turn gold denture bridges into pure gold. Pollak was a multimillionaire. He got whatever permit he needed from important functionaries of the Ministry of Commerce. Pollak had two modern movie theaters in Warsaw. He imported olive oil by tank-loads. He had a banana-maturing nursery in the port of Gdynia. He always could use the Konosamenty that Father, an exporter, had in good supply. Thus, Pollak not only became a major buyer of Father’s Konosamenty, but also, for a fee, he introduced Father to

Government officials in charge of export licenses so badly needed by the Orthodox of Rudnik. Now, Father wanted Max to run the American end of the business, and Mother cried that she would never see her favorite son again.

We also had seen Martin and Pola, his wife of two years. My eldest brother, fourteen years my senior, was a Rock of Gibraltar in economy and logic in the years preceding the war. Now, he was stunned by recent developments. Robinson’s bacon factory, the largest in Poland, where he was the director of the accounting office, had been confiscated by Soviet authorities, and the new production manager, a Russian political official, was stealing goods and money from the day of his installation, while making it clear to my brother that it would be he, Martin, to be held responsible for any discrepancies in the plant’s bookkeeping. For the first time since I could remember Martin said to Father, ‘Help me! Help me to quit!’ Because in the Soviet Union, and that was where we were living now, a worker was forbidden to leave his job. Father, always a little miracle maker, found a way. He gave the Soviet manager a substantial amount of American dollars, and Martin was free to retire from a position he had held since the end of the twenties. What a pity that Martin had declined Mr. Robinson’s offer to become the director of the New York branch of his bacon factory! It was toward the end of 1937, a few months after Martin’s wedding, that his boss had made the decision to expand his activities to the Western Hemisphere. Martin said no because Pola brought him a big apartment building in the center of Lwow as a dowry, and he couldn’t transfer the money he would obtain from the sale of his real estate to America. The Polish law prohibited export of sizable funds. Now, he probably regretted his decision, but if he did he didn’t say so.

Adam, Salek, Pentsak and I reached the center of the town. We stopped under the monument to Adam Mickiewicz, a revered Polish poet of the eighteen hundreds. A round marble column with an ornate top, not unlike a huge Phallus rising from a three-step platform, had the Poet standing next to it, the Angel of Inspiration flying over his head. Only a little more than three weeks ago, thousands of patriots, including the four of us, crammed Plac Marjacki, a centrally located Square in the middle of which the Column had been raised at the turn of the Century. We intoned the ancient Polish hymn ‘Nie damy ziemi skad nasz rod,’ We won’t surrender this Land of Ours, and raised our right hands in a solemn pledge to defend the country from which our roots stemmed to the last drop of our blood. We all lied. We broke our promise. There was no Poland any longer. And there was no Lwow. We were living now in Lvov, CCCP Even the initials of the new country weren’t real. CCCP was the Cyrillic rendition of SSSR, Soyuz Sovyetskeekh Socialeestytcheskeekh Respoobleeks, Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR. ‘And now what?’ said Salek. I knew him since we were twelve. He and Pentsak went to a Science Gymnasium, while Adam and I graduated from the Third Gymnasium of King Stefan Batory. Ours was the real thing, eight years of Latin, five of ancient Greek. But I really knew Adam since we were seven. We went to the same grade school. When the teacher read the daily presence from her student ledger, Adam’s name was always the first one to be uttered. ARNOLD, (that was his last name) Adam. The same was true in the Gymnasium. I didn’t know whether it was still so in the medical school of Lwow, to which he was admitted in 1935, and which refused to accept me. Question of marks? Hardly. Doctor Zalewski, the Polish professor of the medical school who sponsored me in exchange for the sum of one thousand American dollars (a lot of money at that time) that my father put in escrow for him, was a backer of Marshal Pilsudski, Poland’s strongman. Pilsudski died in May that year and professor Zalewski lost his influence. That was too bad. People on whom I counted usually died on me when I most needed them. So, Marshal Pilsudski’s demise was the main reason of my having become a student in foreign universities. Italy. Belgium. France. Something similar happened to Salek and Pentsak. They were refused admission to the school of architecture, and as a result, they went to Milan. We were standing presently on Plac Marjacki, under the monument to Mickiewicz, in the center of Lvov, CCCP, and wondered what would happen next.

‘ I think that all the churches and synagogues soon will be turned into Reitschulen,’ German for horse riding schools, said Pentsak.

‘And I think that I’ll go home,’ said Adam.

At that, we parted.

Our maid Marynia opened the door. This usually glum and taciturn Ukrainian woman with a kerchief on head and an elastic bandage around her varicose left calf greeted me with a bright smile and a lot of information. ‘Your uncle Micio came here the other day and stole the entire supply of canned meat,’ she said. ‘He told me that he had the right to take it because Master, Mistress and Panicz (pronounce: pahneetch; Young Master in Polish) would not be coming back.’ She called PANICZ Max, Gustav, Martin, all our friends and me. ‘And somebody threw a grenade from the roof across the street. It tore apart a peasant, his horse and his wagon. There are three pieces of meat on our windowsill. I didn’t dare to cook them because I don’t know whether it’s the horse or the peasant. Look!’ she pointed with her hand. ‘They’re still lying there.’ Indeed, three large chunks of fresh flesh could be seen through the shattered window. I swept them off. It was difficult to hear from the third-floor apartment when the meat hit the sidewalk. Marynia was happy. ‘I knew that Panicz would know what to do! And we must join the bread line at two at night. Otherwise, the bakery won’t have anything left for us to buy in the morning. And all the windows are broken. They need new glass.’ Our maid expected too much from her inexperienced Panicz. What did I know about finding a glazier? ‘The windows will have to wait till Father and Mother return in just a few days. Let’s go now to the bakery.’

We joined an already long line of people waiting for a chance to purchase bread. It wasn’t that bad in Zloczow. But the town where Martin lived was much smaller than Lvov. There, it was still possible to buy food directly from the farmers. My brother warned me that it would be tough at home, but it was time for me to return. I perused the row of people waiting. They came from all walks of life: housemaids and their employers, businessmen, schoolteachers, university professors, lawyers, and doctors. Bread was important. Everybody needed bread. I remembered an excerpt of The Lord’s Prayer in my Gymnasium Latin, Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie … ‘Yesterday, they sold only half loaves,’ Marynia informed me. ‘There was some talk about reducing it to a quarter of a loaf per person.’

The bakery opened its doors at seven in the morning. Two young women posted themselves at the threshold, and from there handed out half loaves of very black and moist bread in exchange for the money. The Polish Zloty was still the accepted currency, but I had heard rumors still in Zloczow that it would be substituted soon by the Soviet Ruble. My turn arrived. The young woman at the right side of the door seemed taken aback. ‘Franek?’ she said. I looked at her. In white baker’s frock, she was perhaps 5’2" tall, had a thick shoulder-length hair the color of fire and her pinkish cheeks had a few freckles around a short, slightly curved nose. ‘Have we met?’ I asked. ‘You don’t know me. But I know you. A few years back, you were a student in the Stefan Batory Gymnasium.’ I had a flash of recollection. I was seventeen. A female voice told me on the phone, ‘Can you meet me tonight at seven in the lobby of Kino Palace?’ ‘How will I recognize you?’ I asked. ‘You will,’ she said. I was very shy with women, but I was intrigued, and the voice on the phone was attractive. At seven sharp, I was in the ample lobby whose walls were covered with photographs of movie actresses and actors. A few browsers, men and women, watched the pictures, but only one of them, a redhead with pink cheeks, shot stealthy ogles at me while pretending to be perusing the photographs. I had seen her before. There was a ritual in town when Lvov was still Lwow. Socialites, young professionals, university students as well as Gymnasium boys and girls took a walk on Ulica Akademicka also known as Corso, the most elegant Boulevard in the center of town, every evening between seven and eight. The purpose of that promenade was to see and be seen. I must have seen her on the Corso before, and it must have been there that she had seen me. We couldn’t have seen each other in the Gymnasium. Boys in Poland went to boys’ schools, and girls to girls’. That though wasn’t the problem. The point was that I was an aesthete since my childhood years and she wasn’t pretty. But even so, I would have taken a walk with her, had she made the first move. Because, as I had already mentioned, I was too shy to approach a girl I hadn’t been introduced to formally. So, she ogled, I glanced, and finally I turned around and left the lobby of the theater a part of which belonged to my father. And now, she was about to sell me bread. She took two half-loaves in her hands and looked at the other saleslady. Her partner nodded imperceptibly and I was given the whole thing. ‘This is our maid,’ I pointed to Marynia. She too received a double portion. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It has been quite a few years since that evening.’ She blushed. ‘I have a boyfriend. But I’ll see you around.’

‘Panicz has secret admirers,’ said Marynia, as we were walking home. Secret? Boy, was she right! None of my older brothers had ever had a female visitor at home. And I wasn’t ready to break the rule. Even though Martin did it, just once. Two years before marrying Pola, he was officially engaged to a blond, blue-eyed beauty called Blanka. Being an out-of-towner, she slept in our house one night only, but that was sufficient for Mother to declare her a sex fiend and force Martin to break the engagement. ‘It’s good to have secret admirers sometimes,’ I said. ‘They could be of help.’ Suddenly, I felt that the acquisition of the black bread was the first meaningful achievement of my life. It would make my parents proud of their MEZUNEK, of their BENJAMINEK, of Mother’s SHEYFALEH, shortly, of the youngest of the four sons. A few days later, Father and Mother returned from Zloczow. Life was about to turn normal again.

Normal? It was a wishful thinking indeed. Mother began by bemoaning the cans of meat that Martin brought her from Zloczow only a few weeks before the beginning of the war and which her infamous brother Micio had appropriated so shamelessly. ‘It figures,’ Father tried to soothe her. ‘What else would you expect of Micio?’ The eldest of Mother’s three brothers, Micio was a scoundrel by nature and occupation. Jail was his second home. Or third, fourth, fifth. Because, having divorced his lawfully wedded wife, to whom I still continued to refer as Ciocia Gicia, Auntie Gicia, and left his son Kuba and daughter Lusia with her, he declared himself to be an atheist. Once rid of the burden of his Jewishness, he shacked up with an endless succession of Polish ladies, each of whom kicked him out of her house after having discovered during a few months of cohabitation that his love for them was merely a question of room and board. There was even a rumor that his travel bag was always packed, just in case, with a nightshirt, underwear, socks, shaving kit and a toothbrush and tooth powder, should a cop suddenly knock on the door and arrest him for a crime committed or only planned. ‘Now that I’m home the good-for-nothing won’t return,’ Father concluded. ‘I hope that he’ll choke on the canned meat,’ Mother sighed. ‘I need everything. We have no flour, no potatoes, no beets, no cabbage and no cooking oil. With this sudden war, I had no time to buy food supplies for the winter.’ She didn’t mention the windows. That was Father’s problem.

There is no better remedy against people’s alienation from their fellow human beings than a calamity that had befallen everybody at the same time. Next-door neighbors who had hardly ever nodded their heads in a cool greeting now had become gregarious. They stopped one another in the street to share their problems and give unsolicited advice. Sometimes, they were even not only able but willing to help. There was a man who lived a few houses away from us with his wife and their only son who was a university student in England from less than a year before the war broke out. The local housewives had ridiculed for years Mr. Schwartzbart, a well-dressed plump businessman with a short-clipped mustache, as a sissy. Why? Because he must have been the only male in town who, with a linen bag in hand, went to the market each Saturday morning to do the food shopping for his family, a purely female activity in the years preceding the Soviet invasion. ‘Good morning, Mr. Stifel,’ said Mr. Schwartzbart to Father as they ran into each other on Zyblikiewicza Street, where we lived in the apartment house numbered 23, and he in one bearing the figure 45. ‘How are things? I haven’t seen you since the first bomb fell on the city.’ ‘My wife and I have just returned from Zloczow,’ Father explained. ‘Yesterday. What a mess! All our windows are broken and I don’t know how to find a glazier.’ ‘You don’t?’ Mr. Schwartzbart sounded surprised. ‘Yes, thinking of it. They are hard to find nowadays. But I know one. I’ll send him to you.’ ‘You will?’ Father was astonished. A neighbor willing to help? Usually it was my father who helped others. For that, Mother called him derisively in Yiddish, ‘Der Kuhal Fersorger,’ the caretaker of the Jewish Community. Anyway, not much later, the glazier came to the house and that same afternoon all the windows were fixed. That first chance-encounter developed into an occasional logrolling between Father and Mr. Schwartzbart. Through that neighbor’s knowledge of secret sources of such items as flour, potatoes and extremely old soybeans, our family, which was soon joined by Martin and Pola, didn’t suffer hunger. And when Mr. Schwartzbart mentioned that he had no way of sending money to his son in England, Father arranged an underground transfer. He cabled Max in New York, ‘Send 100 baskets to such and such address in England.’ After the addressee had cabled his acknowledgment of the receipt of the funds, Mr. Schwartzbart paid Father $100, with no interest and no strings attached. The cable exchange about baskets between Father and Max was to turn later into a network of all kinds of business deals and money transfers between Lwow and New York, as a result of which Max found himself the trustee of Father’s, Martin’s, Mr. Pollak’s and several other people’s funds. Meantime, thanks to Mr. Schwartzbart, a Ukrainian peasant delivered to us a couple of wagons of firewood in exchange for a few of Mother’s dresses and Father’s suits. The coal dealer didn’t want clothes; he expected to be paid with dollars for the courtesy of filling our coal bin in the basement of the building. Even though the Polish Zloty was a strong dollar-backed currency, businesspeople in Poland, especially the Jewish ones, had the tendency to pay and be paid for their dealings with the American dollars. The English five-pound notes were also popular. They were printed on a cigarette-tissue-like paper; one pound was worth five dollars; and 100 notes could be rolled into a cigar-size roll, a fortune that was easy to hide. Sometimes, when a family emigrated, the wife hid a roll of pounds wrapped in a condom in the vagina, and the customs inspectors weren’t yet sophisticated enough to look in the woman’s private parts for the contraband. Gold coins were not considered business currency. They were the domains of the very rich who had a lot of valuable real estate and didn’t intend to emigrate from Poland, a country where they had hatched a flock of geese that laid golden eggs for them. Often, such hoarded gold was intended as a dowry for their daughters. Dollars, pounds and gold became overnight the most important possessions in the territory occupied by the USSR. A totally unexpected short decree from the Kremlin advised us, the new Soviet citizens, that as of immediately the Zloty had no value, that the Ruble had become the legal tender, and that, regardless of how many Zlotys did one have in his bank account, he was entitled to retrieve fifty Rubles only. The Soviet Union confiscated the balance.

Lvov became the site of confluence of two tempestuous rivers of immigrants. One came from the West, tens of thousands of refugees from the German-occupied part of Poland; the other, from the East, brought hordes of Soviet bureaucrats of a variety of occupations, ranks and degrees of civilization. The locals referred to the Soviets as Russians, although the newcomers were a mixture of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, as well as representatives of an infinity of Asian republics and autonomous territories. The immigrants from Warsaw, Krakow, Lublin and many smaller Polish towns wanted food and shelter. The Russians wanted everything. With the Rubles they had accumulated during the last twenty years, because there was nothing in the USSR that they could purchase, the new rulers bought everything the stores had. There was nothing left for us; not even bread. Mother took to baking loaves of grated raw potatoes, and that became our daily staple. The only food that suddenly appeared on all the street corners was apples. No one asked how did they come to be there. Everybody bought and consumed an apple while going after his business. Jews, a people known for an ability to quip over their own misery, created ad hoc jests appropriate to the new situation. Pre-war Polish press used to refer sarcastically to the USSR as the Bolshevik Paradise. Presently, the Jews explained why the Soviet Union was a paradise: because its inhabitants roamed around barefoot and naked and ate an apple. There was a story about Churchill and Stalin. Stalin received Churchill in his fourth-floor office in the Kremlin. The British Prime Minister asked Stalin, ‘Is it true that every Soviet citizen is ready to give his life for you?’ ‘Of course,’ said Stalin. ‘And I’ll prove it to you.’ He yelled, ‘Ivan!’ A burly Russian officer appeared in the door. ‘Jump out the window!’ ‘As you order, Comrade Stalin.’ And he jumped out. ‘Bator!’ yelled Stalin. A Mongolian officer entered the room. ‘Jump out the window!’ ‘As you order, Comrade Stalin,’ said the Mongol, and he jumped out. ‘Itzek!’ roared Stalin. A diminutive Jewish soldier crossed the threshold. ‘Jump to the street from the window!’ ‘As you order, Comrade Stalin.’ The man was already on the windowsill, when Churchill intervened. ‘You proved your point, Mr. Stalin,’ he said. ‘Let the man live.’ Then, he turned to the Jew and asked, ‘Why did you want to kill yourself? Don’t you have any appreciation for life?’ And the Jew replied, ‘Do you call THIS life?’ A new decree from the Kremlin announced that every inhabitant of Lvov was entitled to not more than a four-square-meter living space per person in his apartment. Consequently, a newly created Soviet Housing Administration confiscated a room or two from the present tenants and forced Russian functionaries upon them. The unannounced arrival of the Pollaks from Warsaw saved us from sharing our home with who knows how many Russians. My parents gave shelter to Adolf Pollak, his wife Mitka and their twelve-year-old son Janusz a.k.a. Jasio. They also made Marysia, Mitka’s daughter from a previous marriage, and her husband Nulek Pisarewski stay with us. In addition, Father found a room in Mr. Schwarzbart’s apartment for Pollaks’ friends Doctor Szejnberg, a gynecologist who had his own clinic in Warsaw, his wife Hala and their son Staszek, a student in the Warsaw medical school. ‘Incredible things happened to us since the outbreak of the war,’ Mitka Pollak recounted, as everybody sat at the solid walnut table in what used to be my parents’ precious salon and ate Mother’s potato bread washed down with some old Tokay wine that Micio forgot to steal. ‘On September 1st, a German bomb fell on our recently opened movie theater and destroyed it completely. We packed everything of value that we could put together into our car and the Szejnbergs filled up their car with their most prized possessions. We headed toward Pinsk, in the Polish Belorussia, hoping that the German offensive would be halted before reaching the Soviet border. On our way, we stopped in front of a country inn to get some refreshments. While we sat inside, a German pilot hit our car with a small bomb and destroyed it with everything in it. We continued to Pinsk in the Szejnbergs’ car. Once there, we took two rooms in a hotel. Then, on the night of September 17th, a group of Soviet soldiers broke into our rooms and confiscated everything we had. I had my nightgown on and told them that I was cold. Luckily, they let me keep my sweater.’ She pointed to six shiny buttons of her cardigan. ‘Each of these is a pure diamond.’ Everybody laughed. There was a saying in Poland, ‘Before the fat man gets skinny, the skinny man will die.’ It was clear that old proverbs didn’t lie. The Pollaks lost everything, but they still were rich.

The University of Lvov, once known as Jana Kazimierza, a 17th century Polish King, has now reopened under the name of Ivan Franko, a 19th Century Ukrainian poet. At about the same time, the new rulers announced that every inhabitant of Lvov was to register with his local police precinct for a Soviet passport. Before the war, a passport was a document one needed to travel out of his Country. Now, passports became a vital necessity. Without one, nobody could continue living in Lvov. To receive a passport, a person had to show good reason for the precinct chiefs to issue it. Father, Pollak, Mr. Schwartzbart, practically all the Jews we knew did not qualify. They were, regardless of their present finances, the classical representatives of the rotten bourgeoisie of the Marxist literature. However, should one of their progeny qualify, they would be allowed to stay. Being a student was a good qualification. Adam, Salek, Staszek Szejnberg, I and a host of other young people rushed to the University gates, filled applications for admission and hoped for a positive outcome. I applied to medical school. I was told that I would be sent to a small town in Central Asia as a senior medic. I declined the offer and enrolled instead in the Department of French Philology. I had the passport. My folks were safe.

I sat at the student desk facing Professor Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski. I felt elated on two counts. The first was the Professor himself who was to interview me. A physician by education, he dropped his profession to become a writer and a translator of French works into Polish. His Polish renditions of Balzac and Francois Villon perhaps surpassed the original versions in quality and style. And nobody ever forgot the trick he played on the reading public with his translation of Descartes’ philosophical works. He convinced the publisher to paste a small sign to the cover that read, ‘For Adults Only.’ The book became an overnight bestseller. The second reason of my euphoria was the fact that I was a student in the University of Lvov, and nobody ordered me to take a seat at the left side of the classroom. Only until last June, Jewish students in the University Jana Kazimierza were forced by their Roman-Catholic colleagues, members of the N.D., the National-Democratic Party (read: Fascists), to move to the left side of the classrooms. That was the first ghetto since the time when Napoleon made the European Jews aware of their humanity. Many Polish Professors objected, some, very strongly. As a result, they were kicked out from their professorial positions. Poland was a Constitutional Democracy that operated relatively well under the rule of benign dictatorship of Marshal Pilsudski. But, after the Marshal’s death in May, 1935, the new government, all Pilsudski’s colonels, was not strong enough, or willing, to suppress the excesses of the Endeks (that was how the members of the N.D. party were called), and let them do to the Jews whatever they pleased. Now, I sat at my desk, equal to my Roman-Catholic classmates, without the fear of being hit on the head with a cane that had a cutting blade attached to its tip. It gave me the feeling of security. I didn’t like though my new Soviet passport. It specified that my nationality was Jewish. Stifel. Jew. It was written in Cyrillic, and it read STIFEL. YEVREY. The Politruk, Political Chief, who issued me the passport, explained it to me. ‘Our great Soviet Union contains over a hundred nationalities. Everybody’s nationality is specified in his passport.’ To be candid, it was so. The passport of my next-desk colleague, a Roman-Catholic girl, said, Anna Jakubiszyn. Pole. Still, I disliked the idea. I was a Jew by birth and religion. But I was a Pole by nationality.

Be it as it might, the passports became a hot commodity. Every refugee wanted one. And so, Father met a certain Mr. Bergman, a man from Warsaw, who, with the help of his common-law wife Helena, made the acquaintance of (read: bribed) several Soviet Politruks. With that, the couple was able to get passports for those in need, who could afford the price. Bergman, Helena, Pollak and Father became busy passport suppliers, an activity that meant income for them and the right to remain in Lvov, CCCP, for many fugitives from the Nazi-occupied Polish territory.

Enormous Soviet freight planes began bringing the first Russian food supplies to Lvov, crystal salt, caviar, and large cans labeled CHATKA, which in Polish meant Little Cabin.

The salt was a bonanza for Ukrainian peasants who ministered to their tiny properties in the villages near the city. Until then, I, an urbanite by definition, didn’t know that salt was essential for a cow’s survival. The Soviet authorities expropriated a good number of grocers, nationalized their stores and put Russian managers in charge. The store windows exhibited open wooden barrels of large-grain red caviar (five Rubles a pound), small-grain black caviar (ten Rubles a pound), and a mountain of the CHATKA cans (two

Rubles a pound). Even though no flour or bread was available, the caviar, until a few months ago only rich people’s favorite appetizer, mesmerized the citizenry. Were two, five, ten Rubles a high or a low price to pay? Nobody could tell. There was no government-controlled valuta market in the Soviet Union. The black market in foreign exchange decided that, at this particular time, one American dollar could purchase thirty Rubles. Viewed from that angle, the caviar and the mysterious CHATKA were dirt-cheap. On the other hand, the monthly wages of a physician (Dr. Szejnberg found a job in a local hospital), a university professor, a coal miner or a chimney sweep were 140 Rubles. University students received a stipend of 120 Rubles a month. For them, the caviar remained expensive. Father, Adolf Pollak and I went to a formerly elegant, now State-run, grocery store on the Corso to buy some caviar. Then, I asked about the cans marked CHATKA. I said, HUTka, a Little Cabin in Polish. The Russian clerk corrected me. She said, SNUTka. It was then that I learned that the label was written in Cyrillic letters. ‘What is Snutka?’ I inquired. ‘Fish,’ she answered. ‘What do we have to lose,’ said Father. Adolf nodded in agreement, and we bought four cans of CHATKA. When we opened a can at home, we discovered that CHATKA was no fish. It was a juicy king crab from the fisheries of Vladivostok, the Pacific shore of the Soviet Union. ‘Only the most exclusive restaurants in Warsaw offered it before the war,’ said Pollak. He knew. He used to be a millionaire. To me, a member of the hoi polloi, the crayfish, the Polish RAK, was considered a king crab. One thing was sure: the two kinds of caviar and the crab tasted delicious when eaten on top of Mother’s potato bread. And the university cafeteria, which until then sold only bitter tea, presently offered a glass of tea and caviar on top of one half of a hard-boiled egg for 50 kopecks (a Ruble had 100 kopecks).

Father convinced Mr. Appel, a commercial photographer who lived on the second floor directly under our apartment, to lease two rooms to the Pollaks and Marysia and Nulek Pisarewski. Instead, he took in the Kugels, Orthodox Jews, an elderly husband and wife, who used to have a grocery store in Rudnik-nad-Sanem, and now were looking for a place to live.

The Soviet authorities decreed that the passport itself was no longer sufficient to allow a family to stay in Lvov. From now on, in addition to the passport a proof of employment was required. An envelope-making firm hired the Kugels. For me, it was sufficient to be enrolled in the university. Martin found a 140-Ruble-a-month job in the accounting office of Malopolska, a huge oil corporation that used to belong to a French-English conglomerate, and now was owned by the Soviet Union. Father and Adolf found employment with the same Company as buyers for its workers’ Food Cooperative. They were issued official purchase permits and were given a truck and a driver. They traveled to far countryside places in search of flour, bacon, butter, eggs, potatoes and cabbage. The Ukrainian peasants didn’t want Rubles for their goods; they wanted to barter them for clothing. Thus, the employees of the Malopolska paid for the food with suits, dresses, underwear, shoes and bed sheets, and Adolf’s and Father’s salary consisted of flour, slabs of bacon, potatoes and cabbage. An occasional goose, chicken or a piece of butter was a private matter between them and the peasant. Food was a big problem. Adam told me that his parents bartered their piano for a wagon of firewood and potatoes. What bothered him was that the Ukrainian peasant hit the keyboard with the naked buttock of his baby-son and said, ‘As of now, little Bohdan, it is you who plays, and not the Jew.’

New arrivals from the East and the West continued overpopulating the city of Lvov. Food, clothing and lodging became a rare commodity, but money was even rarer. Cafe de la Paix was an elegant two-story establishment where before the war the better class of businessmen used to discuss their deals over a glass of Viennese coffee topped with a head of whipped cream. It was brought to the table in adorned silver-plated holders. Those times were gone. Now, the Cafe was filled with customers who, once financially well off, presently put on sale whatever was expendable: a watch, a silver cigarette case, or a cherished family heirloom.

Gold dollars, eagles and half eagles (20-and 10-dollar coins) were put on the block. A new occupation came into being, the brokers between sellers and buyers. Occasionally, that led to a comic outcome. Adolf Pollak gave his pocket watch to a broker for sale. It was a Schaffhausen, a copy indeed of the one my father had, 18-karat gold with a heavy gold lid engraved with graceful arabesques. He asked for it $100. After close to an hour, one of the so many brokers approached Pollak. ‘I have a gold watch for sale,’ he said. ‘The owner wants to remain anonymous. Would you be interested?’ ‘Let me see it,’ said Pollak, always ready to dive into a business proposition. ‘But it is very expensive. $200.’ ‘All right. Where is it?’ Out came the watch from the broker’s pocket; Adolf’s own watch. That was the way it was. People sold, and bought, and made a living from the difference between the bought-and-sold price.

Most of that money, of course, was intended for buying a bite to eat. Consequently, food brokers appeared on the scene with gallon cans of World War I condensed milk that President Woodrow Wilson and his food relief Czar, Herbert Clark Hoover, had sent to Poland to feed the new Country’s hungry children. Equally ancient soybeans and slabs of chocolate covered with a gray-green patina of age followed the milk. Mother did what Mr. Schwartzbart’s soybeans’ recipe called for. According to that gentleman a whole dinner could be made from soybeans: soup; fried patties for entree; and a pudding for dessert. She soaked the beans overnight. They remained hard. She soaked them for 24, 36, 48 hours. Then, totally dejected, she decided to make soup. Each tiny bean remained a tough nut to crack even after six hours of simmering. A buyer of chocolate once complained to the broker that the thing was inedible. ‘What did you expect?’ was the answer. ‘Our goods are to be bought and sold; never to be eaten.’ Russian soldiers weren’t looking for condensed milk or soybeans. What they wanted was wristwatches; women; leather boots and vodka. I once saw a Russian soldier with SIX wristwatches on either forearm. On another occasion, I saw a small-time crook selling a watch to a soldier. The inners of the watch were broken. The crook shook the watch at the soldier’s ear, saying, ‘Can you hear the click-clack inside? Isn’t this a splendid piece of machinery?’ That took place in the Pasaz Mikolasza, a tiny shopping mall where before the war thieves sold their loot, Pan Mikolasz had the largest drug store in town, and two third-rate theaters, Chimera and Uciecha, were running cowboy and Indian pictures. Once, as a teenager, I saw a drunken Polish cavalry soldier who, angry with the black-hatted bad guy attacked the screen with his saber to punish the fellow’s malfeasance. Little had changed between then and now. Only, instead of Polish policemen at whose appearance the thieves’ lookout called, ‘SECHS!’ to warn his comrades, the rascals were selling broken watches to the Russian troops and had no fear of anybody. Soviet petty functionaries were interested in more practical goods than their comrade-warriors were. Whenever they saw the locals lined-up in front of a store, they joined the line without inquiring about the product being sold. New Jewish jokes were heard. A Soviet officer joined a waiting line and purchased a hand meat grinder. An hour later he was back, complaining that his new hurdy-gurdy refused to play no matter how fast he cranked it. Another officer, just assigned a room with a local family, spent close to an hour in the bathroom. When he finally emerged, he said to his host and hostess, ‘It is a fancy arrangement that you have here. But the sink is much too low and the water runs much too fast for me to get a good wash.’ All the Russians smoked a coarse tobacco called MACHORKA rolled in a piece of old newspaper. The Jews forged a joke. ‘What sort of a Country the Soviet Union thinks to be if it considers KAK a word, MACHORKA a saleable merchandise, and JEW a human being?’ KAK, Russian for HOW, sounded very much like KAKO, bowel movement in the Polish childspeak. MACHORKA, the only tobacco available in the Soviet Union was the worst in the world, according to those who smoked. And JEW, of course, did not require elucidation.

The three-story building at number 23 Zyblikiewicza Street although substantial, even massive to the eye, had only two apartments to a floor, all of which, except for the one across from our landing, were occupied by good middle-class Jewish families. The non-Jewish tenants, our immediate neighbors, were the Banachs. Stefan Banach, before the war a mathematics’ professor in the University of Lwow, was the author of a theorem called The Banach Space, something that was always Greek to me, but that the important world mathematicians hailed as a great achievement. He and his wife, two tall, bulky patrician individuals had just one son, a good-looking young man about my age. Before the war, we just exchanged a nod of greeting with them. Since the Red Army had occupied our town, the Banachs, though still living in their apartment, became virtually invisible. Only the rumor persisted (it had been whispered even before the war) that Mr. and Mrs. Banach had just one steady companion: a bottle of vodka. The photographer Mr. Appel, whom I had mentioned before, and Mr. Raps, a lawyer, occupied the two second-floor apartments. The lawyer, a tall slim man in his early fifties, had one striking feature: an enormous nose that could be a gigantic eagle’s beak or Cyrano de Bergerac’s proboscis. In France, Mr. Raps’s nose might qualify him as a knight. In Lvov, it made him a Jew. Mr. Appel was a widower; Mr. Raps must have been single, because I had never seen any other Rapses around. On the first floor backyard apartment lived the janitor Wojciech with his wife and a plentiful brood. When Father and Adolf Pollak began bringing supplies from their Malopolska food safaris, the janitor Wojciech became their silent partner. He would ring the bell in the evening, first at our door, then at that of the Pollaks, and stand wordless at the other side of the threshold. All he did was to caress his huge drooping mustache and wait. He never left without a piece of bacon and a sack of flour or potatoes. Building janitors became official spies of the new rulers. Nobody would dare to incur the wrath of a janitor. The last tenant, a Jewish man called Roth, lived in a third floor apartment that could be reached only through the kitchen stairs and an iron balcony that faced the building’s courtyard. Mr. Roth had just returned from Bereza Kartuzka, the only Polish concentration camp, into which he was thrown because of the failure to keep in good repair an old apartment building he owned in the Jewish quarter. Freed by the Red Army, Mr. Roth, a skinny ill-dressed man close to sixty never had given a glance at his neighbors, let alone said hello. Our building had a large entrance hall and a wide wrought iron gate that used to have glass panels, but had them no longer after the explosion of the grenade across the street. According to a century-old local curfew rule, the gate was open during the day, but at 10 P.M. sharp Wojciech locked it. Any tardy arrival had to ring the bell and pay him a tip in exchange for opening and re-locking the gate. It was there, on Zyblikiewicza Street, that I ran across three men who had played or were to play one day a part in my private life.

The first I met was Krzysztof Krzysztoferski, a classmate of mine from the years in the King Stefan Batory Gymnasium. He was going in the direction of the Park Stryjski, a beautiful public garden where I had been beaten many times by the university Endeks during my growing up years. I was going toward Mikolaja Street and the city center. He stopped. I stopped. ‘Franek?’ he said. ‘Franek Stifel?’ ‘Krzysztof!’ was my response. I was surprised. Last time I saw him was during our Matura celebration, a dinner with Professor Mackiewicz in the old Atlas Winery and Tavern. He went directly to the point. He moved the edge of his hand across his throat, a symbolic sign of slaughter. ‘Look what you have done to our beautiful Poland,’ he said. ‘Keep this in mind: Jewish heads will roll during the spring counteroffensive.’ Something like that had to be expected from Krzysztof; he wasn’t all there since the time when, at the age of fourteen, he was mauled by a brown bear during a school excursion to the Warsaw zoo, the only zoological garden in Poland. He remained scarred forever, physically and emotionally. And, because a Jewish classmate stood next to him when it happened, he made the Jews responsible for his misfortune. The spring counteroffensive was a popular notion. Unable to come to terms with the new developments, many Poles in Lvov still hoped that the defeated Polish army would counterattack Hitler’s forces, some time in March or April 1940, and defeat Germany. I wished it would be so, but it was difficult to figure out how that could happen. The entire Polish government and the General Staff of the armed forces found shelter in Romania in September. I saw disarmed Polish soldiers going back home from the vicinity of the Soviet border. Did Krzysztof know something I didn’t know? Was a new intact Polish army lurking in wait somewhere in the Puszcza Bialowieska or in the Carpathian Mountains to hit suddenly at the back of the German Wehrmacht sometime in March or April? A lot of Poles talked about the spring offensive. It made me think of the September defeat. Practically everybody hoped that the army’s retreat was a strategic move. That, come the autumn with its heavy rainfalls, the German tanks would drown in the marshes of the Polish backwoods and be destroyed by the picturesque Ulans on their swift horses. Now, I said to Krzysztof, ‘Shame on you. You know that I am not a Communist.’ To be candid, many young Jewish intellectuals in Poland tended toward the theoretical Communism before the war. They were dreamers. Once confronted with Stalin’s realities of life, they changed their opinion. It was only the Jewish riffraff that enjoyed Poland’s gloom. But they weren’t the legitimate representatives of the great majority of Poland’s Jews.

On another occasion, Rysiek Dobrzyniecki and I crossed paths on Zyblikiewicza Street. A son of minor Polish gentry, he came from the provinces of eastern Poland and lived as a boarder with a family that had an apartment near the Stryjski Park. I never knew why he had chosen me, a Jew, to be his best friend during the years when we were classmates in the Gymnasium of Stefan Batory. We had become very close. But when, after having graduated from the Gymnasium and spent two years in Italy, I came to Lwow for a summer vacation, Adam warned me about Rysiek. ‘Your best friend has become a leader of an Endek gang,’ he said. ‘He made them break Jewish heads, while you were having good time in Napoli.’ I found it difficult to believe. Rysiek? MY Rysiek an anti-Semite? But then, we saw each other on the Corso. I was going up, toward

Plac Marjacki; he was going down, with three other fellows wearing round colored velvet caps of an Endek Fraternity. All four were armed with canes. I stared at him intensely. My eyes tried to contact his but to no avail. I became transparent; he wouldn’t see me. ‘I told you so,’ Adam said on the day after. ‘You are lucky that they hadn’t beaten you up.’ They didn’t on that occasion. But a few days later, when I was walking home with my mother, after having seen a movie with her (The Good Earth with Paul Muni; an unforgettable production), a huge gang of Endek students, perhaps twenty or more, shaped up at the corner of Mikolaja Street. Rysiek wasn’t with them, but Mali was, a biology student who had haunted me since the last two years of Gymnasium. He was a University student when I was seventeen; now that I was twenty-two, he still was a student, and was getting ready to beat me up the way he used to in the good old days. But I couldn’t permit that to happen with my mother present. So, I asked a policeman to help me. He took the rifle off his shoulder. He put it back on it. Then, he said, ‘No.’ ‘Look at that mob!’ I said. ‘This is a free country,’ was his reply. ‘People can meet at will.’ That was good for the United States, but it wasn’t good enough in Lwow; not good enough for me. ‘You WILL help me!’ I ordered the fellow, shaking him up by the belt of his rifle. ‘Documents!’ he barked. Then, the incredible happened. I flashed my passport. Loaded with foreign visas as it was, it must have stunned the cop. He took me for a diplomat. He snapped to attention. ‘Yes, Sir!’ he said. ‘What may I do for you?’ ‘I want you to accompany my mother and me to our residence,’ I ordered. The cop took off his rifle and, holding it